Barbara Ann Hendricks Englund

From Stephens to Paris, ‘retired’ opera star Barbara Hendricks has performed on and off the stage and worked for human rights as a U.N. good will ambassador.

Barbra Hendricks 

06/Mats Bäcker
Barbra Hendricks 06/Mats Bäcker

Two years after Barbara Hendricks was born there, the population of the southwest Arkansas town of Stephens peaked at 1,283.

Stephens (population in the 2010 census, 891) isn't considered a musical capital or the capital of anything. It's not even the Ouachita County seat. (That's Camden, up U.S. 79 a ways to the northeast.)

And, at least in her home state, Hendricks, a soprano whose life's journey took her through high school in Little Rock, the Juilliard School in New York and eventually to the major music centers on several continents, probably isn't even Stephens' best-known former resident. (That honor likely belongs to author Dee Brown.)

Hendricks has performed with the world's great opera companies -- San Francisco, Deutsche Oper in Berlin, the Staatsoper in Vienna, the Paris Opera, the Metropolitan Opera in New York and La Scala in Milan. And she has sung with many of the world's greatest conductors -- Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein, Daniel Barenboim, Neville Marriner, Carlo Maria Guilini, Sir Georg Solti.

That's not including her recital programs, or her nearly 100 recordings -- everything from Mozart to Mahler to a collection of spirituals.

In the past 20-plus years, she has also been a good will ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and hobnobbed with world leaders, including Bishop Desmond Tutu, former French President Francois Mitterand, former Czech President Vaclav Havel and former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, who penned the foreword for her recently released memoir, Lifting My Voice.

She sang for the January 1993 inauguration of President Bill Clinton (the only classical performer on the program) and attended the 1994 inauguration of South African President Nelson Mandela. There's even a sixth-through-ninth-grade school in Orange, France, named for her: College Barbara Hendricks.

Hendricks, 67, now lives in Norrtalje, Sweden, on an island an hour north of Stockholm, with her second husband, Ulf Englund, whom she married in 2003. She has two children, now in their 30s, from her marriage to Martin Engstrom, from whom she was divorced in 1996, and a stepson, Malcolm.

"I'm still working," she says. "I'm officially retired, but I'm still doing concerts. I have one this [late May] weekend at a jazz festival in Stockholm. I do things that I find fun or that are in good places that have good food or good wine. Things that I enjoy. I still enjoy working with other musicians and being on stage.

"So long as the health of my instrument is still optimal, I will continue to sing. I've been very lucky throughout my life to have had good health in general, and I've taken good care of myself. I've been blessed to have good vocal health and to continue to be able to sing most of my repertoire past my retirement age."

Hendricks is a lyric soprano. "Mimi in La Boheme, that's mine," she explains. "But then, of course, I sing Mozart and [Richard] Strauss, too.

"I never had a year in my career without having Mozart arias in my repertoire. What Mozart does is keep my voice pure and healthy. Mozart has just kept the machinery lean and maneuverable, and to be subtle and keep the dynamics. Not being able to sing Mozart [would be] devastating. Mozart has been my most constant companion as a [performer]."

It's a safe bet, however, that Hendricks didn't get much exposure to Mozart growing up in Stephens. ("None," she says firmly.) She started out singing in church, and while in junior high in Pine Bluff, "I was allowed to sing in the high school choir because they needed sopranos and I had a very high voice, and so it was fantastic for me. We sang everything, Negro spirituals, music from Broadway musicals."

As she chronicles in her memoir, Hendricks and her family -- her father was a Methodist preacher and her mother a teacher -- moved around a lot, living at various times in Memphis and Chattanooga, Tenn., Pine Bluff and eventually Little Rock, where she attended the predominately black Horace Mann High School in the mid-1960s.

"We sang jazz with Arthur Porter [now better known as the late Art Porter Sr., at the time, the director of the Horace Mann choir], but we also sang a little bit of Messiah and a little bit of Bach cantatas. But I don't remember even knowing at that time what it was that I was actually singing. It was just music to me.

"But I do remember when I was 12, I sang my first opera, in Pine Bluff. I sang [the role of] Amahl in Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors, a boy's part, but I had kind of a boyish soprano at the time."

Hendricks says the pure character of her voice came naturally.

"The sound of my voice is not something that I learned," she explains. "I had a lot of things to learn once I started to seriously study music, but the sound of my voice is something I was born with, the timbre, the vibration. It has always been a lean, pure instrument.''

Turning point

At 19, between her junior and senior years at Lane College in Tennessee, she hooked into an exchange program with Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln, Neb., "and just for fun, I entered a singing competition ... and I actually won it, to everyone's surprise. I hadn't a clue what I was singing, really. I learned what I sang from a recording of Puccini arias. I had a pretty good ear."

What she had won with her pretty good ear was no ordinary singing competition; it was the Nebraska district Metropolitan Opera auditions. That led to a scholarship at the prestigious Aspen Music School in Aspen, Colo., which is where she met Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano Jennie Tourel.

"That summer was the turning point of my life," Hendricks says. "I spent nine weeks there, and that was the first time I was in an environment that was a complete environment of classical music.

"Tourel was singing in Mahler's Second Symphony, and I sang in the choir -- the only time we ever sang together. Musicians practicing from the time I got up in the morning to the time I went to bed. Fantastic concerts on the weekend, real voice lessons with Tourel, which I had not known how to prepare for, because my lessons at the university were a little bit like taking archery classes -- just for fun."

Tourel praised her talent and told her she would accept her as a student if she could get into Juilliard.

Despite graduating from the University of Nebraska at 20 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and chemistry, she prepared well enough for her audition to Juilliard to get in, and her life's focus became music.

At that time, Juilliard did not have dormitories, so Hendricks found herself literally singing for her supper. She got into a program that sent musicians into New York schools, "particularly ghetto schools -- I suppose ghetto schools isn't politically correct nowadays," she recalls, at $55 a concert. "I was very successful -- well, by successful, I was always able to finish my program; the kids weren't throwing things or being disruptive.

"Those young kids, junior-high-school age, taught me an invaluable lesson, almost as important as what I was learning at Juilliard, [and] far more valuable than what I probably gave [them]," and that lesson was: "What is important during the performance is that the audience connect [with] my own honesty about what I am doing, my own involvement about the music that I sing, even if they don't understand what I'm singing or why I was singing it.

"I learned ... never to sing down to them."

Soprano Christine Donahue, who settled in central Arkansas after an international opera career that included several appearances with the Arkansas Opera Theatre and the Opera Theatre at Wildwood, now teaches at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway.

"I use her recording of [Claude] Debussy's 'C'est l'extase langoureuse' when I teach Vocal Lit because I find it so yummy," Donahue says of Hendricks. "I met her eons ago when I was at Juilliard. She was visiting as she had finished her degree the year or so before. Her teacher, the great Jennie Tourel, was a friend of my college piano teacher."

Top conductors

Just before she graduated from Juilliard, an agent from Columbia Artists in the audience at a performance of Mozart's The Magic Flute in which Hendricks was singing the role of "First Boy" called Tourel about representing Hendricks. She had an agent when she left Juilliard, an agent who sent her to auditions with world-class conductors touring New York.

Her American orchestral debut took place with the Chicago Symphony and Georg Solti. She also sang with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Claudio Abbado. But it was a leading role in the 1976 world premiere of David del Tredici's Final Alice, a bicentennial commission by six major American orchestras, that led to singing engagements with many more major American and European orchestras.

She made her professional opera debut in 1976 with the San Francisco Opera in a production of Claudio Montiverdi's The Coronation of Poppea. Her Paris Opera debut followed in 1982, her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1986 and her La Scala debut in 1987.

"I've had a 40-year career. I had enough [early] success to not get discouraged and not to lose my way," she says. "It was not an overnight success, thank goodness, because I needed the time to learn new music and to keep my feet firmly grounded in the dirt of rural Arkansas, which kept me on the ground. And I needed that, not to go too fast."

It has been two decades since her last trip to Arkansas, a 1994 visit to her parents, who were then living in Little Rock, but she says she'd be happy to come back to her home state and do a recital.

"The last time I visited, I came with my family [for] Easter several years go, a year or so before Art Porter died [in November 1996], and it was such a gift to be able to see him again."

She isn't bothered that she's much more famous in Europe than in the United States, certainly than she is in Arkansas.

"I don't long to be where I'm not," she says. "I can't complain that I'm less well known in Arkansas, except that people should know I belong to them, that's a big part of who I am, and I'm proud of it."

Good will ambassador

Hendricks is also proud of her 26 years of work with the U.N., which has taken her to a lot of places less glamorous than Paris and Berlin. Less glamorous, even, than Stephens.

In 1989, for example, she visited refugee camps in Zaire along the borders with Namibia and Mozambique. In 1990, she visited a Vietnamese camp in Malaysia. In 1992, she looked in on Cambodian refugees in Thailand. She recently traveled to the Ivory Coast to work with stateless people there.

On New Year's Eve 1993, she took on her most dangerous assignment. Wearing her metaphorical opera-star and refugee-ambassador hats and a very real bullet-resistant vest, she sang for peace with the Sarajevo Philharmonic Orchestra at a television station in Sarajevo, Bosnia, while Serbian artillery pounded the city.

"Since I have known Barbara Hendricks, she has also used her voice to shape the lives of others and taken her responsibility as a citizen very seriously," says Kofi Annan, the former U.N. secretary general, in the foreword to Lifting My Voice.

Annan continues, "I have been moved by Barbara's singing on a number of occasions; she seemed to have read my mind at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in 2001 when she sang 'Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,' just before my acceptance speech. ... And I will never forget her moving tribute after the deadly attack on the U.N. headquarters in Iraq that killed 22 of our most dedicated colleagues, including our close friend, Sergio Vieria de Mello, in August 2003.

"Her life has been fueled by an insatiable curiosity, a search for truth and a willingness to serve. Through her work, Barbara has become a symbol of hope for millions."

Hendricks says having been a witness to the civil rights movement, and having been politically active as a college student, "I came to realize that there must be rights that exist for all of us. It's not who's the strongest and who's on top and who's on the bottom."

"When the UNHCR [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] asked me to work with them nearly 30 years ago, I really saw that as an opportunity to put my beliefs about human rights into action. ... I'm still doing that.

"Art has the power to remind us that we belong to that family of humanity, and that family, in order to prosper, and to go toward some kind of peace and harmony, must be based on the respect of human rights for everyone."

High Profile on 07/20/2014

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